Free The Attacking Ocean by Brian Fagan

lacks a Coca-Cola or other large corporation to help pay the bill. Congress and the Bush administration did spend large sums on the city, but unfortunately they rejected proposals for a large-scale buyout of inundated housing as a basis for redeveloping the entire city. Instead, Washington gave billions in grants to individual homeowners, who wanted to return, and also for such projects as building schools, libraries, and water treatment plants. This was all fine and good, but the money was distributed inefficiently, much of it after very long delays. A patchwork of redevelopment made it nearly impossible for the poverty-stricken city government to provide basic services such as garbage collection, fire protection, and policing in a systematic manner.
    All of these delays and often mistaken decisions tended to reinforce a widespread impression that no one outside the city cared about a poor, largely black population. There was even a sense among black community members that neither the Bush administration nor white New Orleans wanted blacks to return. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in the New York Review of Books , an ancient fear of black insurrection tended to resurface, accompanied by a longing for the city to be reborn as “another Charleston or Savannah, smaller, neater, safer, whiter, and relieved of the obligation to try to be a significant modern multicultural city.” 11 This was, of course, merely a feeling and something that never even slightly surfaced as city policy.
    Racial undercurrents of all kinds were at the heart of the toxic politics of rebuilding that emerged just as soon as the floodwaters receded. A Republican real estate developer assigned to the design of a comprehensive rebuilding program by the mayor, Ray Nagin, suggested that some of the most devastated, poorest, and lowest-lying areas of the citynot be rebuilt immediately. Black outrage reached a fever pitch. Many out-migrants felt they were being deliberately excluded from their homes. The chasm between black and white widened even further. This debacle killed the mayor’s plan and meant that there was no blueprint at all. As recently as 2010, fifty thousand houses were still empty, more than a quarter of the available housing in the city. The current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, is moving cautiously. He is willing to tear the derelict houses down as part of a new policy that proclaims that every neighborhood will be rebuilt and that one cannot simply wait for displaced residents to return.
    Meanwhile, the long-term consequences of the disaster continue. The city is much smaller, so population-based federal funds for housing, health care, and infrastructure are much reduced. Old political districts will be redrawn, resulting inevitably in less black representation at both the state and federal levels and a loss of political power. The permanent displacement of many poorer inhabitants has increased the percentage of educated, high-income residents. The redevelopment of low-income housing is glacially slow, causing some to question whether the recovery effort is equitable. By 2010, about 54 percent of the evacuees had returned to their pre-Katrina addresses. There are powerful reasons to stay away: the lack of affordable housing and a shortage of rental properties. Much recovery funding went to homeowners, who are in a minority among poorer citizens. With little money, few job opportunities, and a shortage of affordable housing, many refugees left permanently.
    THE PLIGHT OF the Mississippi delta confirms that we have few options when confronted by extreme weather events made ever more dangerous by rising seas. Armoring cities and coasts with levees and seawalls is, at best, a costly gamble, even if twenty-first-century construction and technology provides ever more secure barriers. Even adopting building codes that allow for surging hurricanes and permit people to take shelter in their homes is an expensive hedge against catastrophic destruction. The only